I remember my first few days after discovery. I was in a fog. My partner had found porn on their iPad, confronted me, and I denied everything again. I started going to SAA meetings the next day. But who could I talk to? It was first time I felt the taboo feelings around sex addiction. I was alone surrounded by people I didn’t know. The rooms were a new place for me and I didn’t understand the nuances of my new-found addiction, much less these strangers and their brutal honesty in spilling their guts every time they appeared before the group.

That was when I turned to journaling. I had never journaled before. So, off into the world of the Apple App Store I went to find the latest and greatest of journaling apps. I downloaded what seemed to be 7 or 8 apps. It didn’t take long before Day One rose out of the ashes as the app to make the cut when all others didn’t.

I didn’t expect an app to be able to integrate like Day One did for me.

Here are a few features that I like about Day One:

• Geolocation for posts

  • Where was I when I wrote my entry? Not a problem, as the location tracking helped me remember not only the location, but the people that were in the room with me, and things that were said. Early on, my day-to-day was a blur and I didn’t even know where I had been on some days.

• Embedding pictures into my journaling

  • I really like this feature because there were times we were reading out of Voices of Recovery and I wanted to record the reading as well as type out my feelings related to that particular meeting.

• Tagging

  • I could tag entries with different key words such as SAA, SLAA (I attended SLAA for a while in conjunction with SAA), sponsor meetings, first steps, and other unique tags. This is really good for finding an entry later on.

• Scanning text

  • This option scans the reading materials right off of the page. It wasn’t in the app when I first started using it, but it is a nice upgrade.

• Multiple journals

  • I also keep a medical journal along with my sex addiction journal. It is separate for the right reasons. You can have several journals if you like and name them whatever you want to.

• Rich Text Formatting

  • This allows you to emphasis what is important. I like to journal how I talk and not talk like I journal. I’m not an author as you already know by now.

Day One really allowed me to process my addiction on my terms. Thank you Day One.